Peter Cai n
Beau Rutland Collier Schorr Richard Meyer
Matthew Marks Gallery
Contents
15 A Saturday Disaster:
The Life and Art of Peter Cain
Beau Rutland
107 The Body of C
Collier Schorr
129 The Last of Peter Cain
Richard Meyer
151 Exhibition History
157 Bibliography
Peter Cain’s studio two weeks after his death
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Peter Cain in Provincetown, MA, 1993
A Saturday Disaster:
The Life and Art of Peter Cain
Beau Rutland
“It’s hard to describe a painting. You can describe to a certain extent , but it’s always more
than that. Always. The more is the part that matters. ” —Robert Ryman 1
“I didn ’t ask to be a legend. ” —Judy Garland
Peter Cain didn’t ask to be a legend. Like countless other talents before him, he
died younger than we would have liked. But a tragic death does not a legend make.
Cain has remained of interest to enterprising young art historians and artists for
his expertly executed, inscrutable paintings. Yet part of his work’s appeal since his
death in 1997 has been the requisite act of discovery: the unearthing of a history
that, oddly, has yet to be fully written, and the tracking down of artworks that
belong to curiously few institutional collections.
After all, staying remembered takes a lot of energy and effort, and not just on
the part of the artist. Within contemporary art, as with any field that focuses on
the next rather than the now, being forgotten in favor of what’s currently fashion¬
able is almost a given. Even if an artist achieves something great — say, a rave
review in The New York Times — he or she still has to show up to galleries and
lectures and dinners in order to remain part of the conversation; an artist must
first establish a legacy before it can become someone else’s job to maintain.
Peter Cain was part of the conversation from the late 1980s through the
1990s. He received rave reviews, was included in landmark exhibitions, and had a
horde of artist friends. Less than a decade into his career as an artist, he died sud¬
denly at age thirty-seven. For the generation of artists who were around New York
during his lifetime (and a younger generation of art enthusiasts who have discov¬
ered his work through exhibition catalogues from the 1990s), he is seen as a “cul-
tish” figure, an appellation given to him by The New York Times in 1995. 2
Along the lines of Robert Ryman’s quote above, you only need to spend a few
minutes in front of a car painting by Cain to see that there is more to it than its
source material and everyday subject matter. He would rework, edit, and distort
15
various makes and models through an analog process of cutting and pasting, then
render the new construction with oil paint in a manner that verged on realism.
Between 1987 and 1995 his paintings evolved, subtly and sweetly, requiring one to
look rather than just see. Then, in 1995 and 1996, he began two new bodies of work,
both radically different from and perfectly harmonious with his previous output.
In an essay published shortly after Cain’s unexpected death, Carroll Dunham,
a friend and fellow painter, wrote, “With Peter’s death, I’ve never felt so aware of
art history’s contingency on the actual.” 3 What Dunham says is true and unset¬
tling. If you were to die today, would your life’s work stand the test of time? Which
ideas of yours would go unrealized? Dunham continues, “We don’t count what
people think about or what they might have done, only what they do.” As Cain
was a slow and fastidious painter, this automatically leaves his work and his legacy
in a precarious situation.
Considering that he never fully made the transition from emerging artist to
firmly established one, the literature on Cain is surprisingly abundant. Most articles,
written around four moments in his life and afterlife — clustered around specific
solo exhibitions in 1991, 1993, 1997, and 2005 — echo the same sentiments and
ideas. This speaks more to the circumstances of the writings than to the authors
themselves. Most of these reviews and essays were written as either a spotlight of a
young artist on the rise or a touching tribute to an artist taken too soon.
Over the twenty years since his death, information about Cain and his work
has become cloaked by time; some of his relatives and closest friends have died, a
handful of paintings are in unknown locations, and the memories of those who
survive him are tenuously tied to old feelings. Details have been lost, but his work
remains. Given the scant material on his personal life, a certain human texture
and sense of motivation — necessary aspects of any critical biography — are dif¬
ficult to summon. For this essay, when possible, firsthand accounts were gathered
via interviews conducted with members of the artist’s circle. The following pages
are an attempt to retrieve the underappreciated history of Peter Cain, to look at
it anew, and to provide a comprehensive overview of his innovations, challenges,
and legacy.
*
Peter Cain was born in Orange, Newjersey, in 1959. Part of a conservative family
with traditional values, he grew up, alongside two sisters and a brother, in
Livingston and then Morristown, both upper-middle-class towns a short train
ride from Manhattan. In 1978 he graduated from Madison High School, where he
was a close friend of Joan Wallace, who soon after became a 1980s art-world fix¬
ture as one half of the duo Wallace and Donohue. Cain experimented with art
throughout his youth; according to his sister Margaret, he “always loved to paint
and draw and had a special penchant for cars.” 4 He spent his adolescence roaming
around New York City, exploring what the downtown scene had to offer, whether
going to shows at CBGB, befriending the art critic Edit DeAk, or allegedly dating
Mudd Club co-owner Diego Cortez.
Cain eventually left Newjersey for New York in the late 1970s. He attended
Parsons at the New School, later transferring to the School of Visual Arts, where
16
Fig. 1
Peter Cain in his studio on the Bowery, 1991
he studied painting until he graduated in 1982. In 1984, despite his parents’ pro¬
testations, he decamped to Brazil with a boyfriend. Returning the next year, Cain,
like many young artists just starting out in the city to this day, began a string of
studio-assistant jobs for high-profile 1980s figures including Donald Baechler,
McDermott & McGough, and Ray Smith. Following a disagreement with Smith,
Cain quit on the spot; it was the last time he worked for another artist. Not one to
compromise his ideals, his independent streak and sense of pride would greatly
factor into his career in the following years.
Cain was very dear to many people, whether as a friend, a fellow artist, a lover,
or even just an acquaintance. He clearly was the type of person you would want to
be around. He was also painfully shy, which seems surprising, considering the
self-confidence so many of his friends have mentioned. But this self-confidence
mainly revolved around his artwork — his paintings are imbued with it. According
to Cain’s longtime friend and fellow artist Frank Camarda, “Peter took his work
very seriously,” an observation shared by many others. 5 Incredibly smart but also
stubborn, he could not be pushed into doing something if he wasn’t interested. A
certain artist archetype comes to mind here, as embodied by Paul Thek: good
looks accompanying social graces in the face of social anxiety, the “odd man in.” 6
During interviews, those who knew Cain were always eager to attempt to describe
his unique melange of qualities.
As an artist, Cain seemed to have an aura about him. A recollection by one of
his art dealers, Simon Watson, helps give context to Cain’s approach to artmaking.
Watson was a key figure in downtown New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
and he ran a traditional gallery before opening a project space on Lafayette Street. 7
He met Cain in 1988 through Camarda, who was working at that time as a free¬
lance art handler, and he recalls selling just three or four paintings, directly out of
the studio, where Cain was often surrounded by car magazines and paper clip¬
pings. According to Watson, Cain’s studio apartment (which doubled as his art
studio) had the air of a “high school rec room/gym: not slovenly, but... running
shoes all over and ‘Sorry for the bed.’” Still, in the midst of all this personal jum¬
ble, Cain’s work stood out as a quiet meditation. As Watson notes, “The drafting
table was the one pristine space.” During studio visits, sometimes by inquisitive
collectors, Cain provided mostly monosyllabic responses.
In the words of Nan Goldin, “Peter was very special. He was our all-American
boy, a dreamboat.” 8 Cain’s dating life appeared to have been rather lively, if not
prolific; his good looks and boyish charm became a thing of legend. In conducting
interviews for this essay, it was not unusual to ask how someone first met Peter
Cain and then hear the reply, “Oh yeah, Peter and I dated.” Ricky Clifton, interior
designer and bon vivant, claims to have been the first in the art world to “discover”
Peter, while cruising on the Chelsea Piers. Curator Bill Anting remembers sitting
behind Cain on a bus to a gay rights rally in Washington, DC. And let us not for¬
get the period when Cain dated Misty, of Goldin’s indelible 1991 photograph
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC. All of which illustrates how incredibly
full of life Cain was — a fact that remains difficult to imagine with so few traces of
his personal life preserved in the public realm.
*
17
Cain’s oeuvre more or less begins in 1987, when he was twenty-eight years old. In
a fit of frustration, he destroyed nearly all of his early work on a trip home to New
Jersey. The earliest surviving work, fittingly, contains a car. You can’t exactly call
it a car painting, however. Untitled [p. 35] depicts a convertible cruising along a
winding coastal road, its driver wearing sunglasses as he turns the wheel hard to
the right. Across all of Cain’s paintings, this is the only motorist to be shown. An
array of dry brushstrokes constituting pavement and roadside brush give the sen¬
sation of speed without much fuss. Based upon a full-page magazine advertise¬
ment, it is the closest the artist ever came to appropriating a commercial image
wholesale, without alteration. Effectively a duplication of an ad, it fits within
Cain’s work as an exercise in reproduction. As a test run of sorts, it serves an
important role in revealing the paths he chose not to take, leaving behind narra¬
tive, the human form, and outright appropriation.
Throughout the next two years Cain focused intensely on his automotive sub¬
ject matter, exploring various possibilities for representing the car through a wide
range of formal solutions. One early series of grisaille paintings [pp. 40-43] depicts
mammoth 1950s sedans and station wagons (already vintage in 1988) parked in situ
against various landscapes. The source images were originally published in the
pages of Collectible Automobile, specifically a spread focused on Ford sedans from
1956 and 1957, including the Fairlane, Country Sedan, and Ranchero [fig. 2]. Other
works [pp. 81-87] were based on sales notices that could be found in the back of
trade magazines, many of which read like personal ads. Untitled (1988) [p. 39] is the
largest painting of the group, perhaps sized so that Cain could fit the entirety of the
chic-though-hearse-like 1974 Cadillac Fleetwood Series limousine onto the canvas
without sparing any detail. Per the ad it was taken from [fig. 3], “All the luxuries
including front & rear stereo, heat & air, divider glass, jump seats, $3500. Fly in and
drive home. 919-537-4843.” Curiously, one of the cars he sourced [fig. 4] appears to
be split in half, a hybrid of the changes between one year’s design and the next, a
combination of the outmoded and newly engineered.
Such early works reveal an interest not just in manipulating images, but in the
ways that an image is capable of manipulating or influencing how one perceives its
subject matter. One painting, Untitled (1989) [p. 47], shows Cain evoking high
noon on the highway, when the asphalt, under a blistering sun, appears wet and
reflective, mirage-like. And yet the painting is based on a photo of the back end of
a white Oldsmobile at dusk, the fading sunlight reflecting off its body in puddles
of light; the taillights are lit and glow ominously.
As many writers have opined, automobiles easily conjure the entire spectrum of
modem life: money, sex, power, freedom, death, destruction, and salvation. Cain
experimented with the car as a symbol, a ready-made image, by only slightly altering
his source material of choice (primarily print ads from auto-industry trade maga¬
zines): removing a door’s lip here, elongating a chassis there, and repositioning the
car within the composition of a canvas. Surely he was aware of his imagery’s possible
connotations, but — and this seems particularly important to note — his friends are
quick to point out that he didn’t know much about cars or what made them run, and
he didn’t much care to know. Oddly, his early critics assumed that he lived for cars,
as if he harbored a teenager’s after-school passion. For instance, Grace Glueck wrote
that “some artists are fascinated by pulchritudinous women; Mr. Cain has his cars.” 9
Country Sedans, a pair of four-doors
with Fairlane 500 appointments in
two-seat (six-passenger) and three-
seat (nine-passenger) configurations.
Last but not least was the premium
Country Squire, a nine-place four-
door distinguished by its customary
woody-look panelling on bodysides
and tailgate. The revived car-based
pickup arrived in December 1956 as
the Ranchero, essentially the Ranch
Wagon with an open load bed aft of
the B-posts. Available in standard and
Custom models, it was officially a
Ford Truck Division product
Except for engines, the '57s were
new from the ground up—and not
very far up, as overall height was
trimmed by an impressive four inches
to 57.2 overall. Quipped Popular Sci-
only to a Belgian Congo pygmy." Yet
despite their low, squatty look, they
were every bit as roomy as the 1955-56
models, and wider doors made entry/
Ford's '57 styling originated in the
"Mystere" show car, a space-age
dreamboat typical of the decade, cre¬
ated by Bill Boyer of the Advanced
Styling Studio in the summer of 1954.
"The Mystere was a full-size car,"
Boyer recalls. "It had an operating
Fig. 2
Collectible Automobile magazine, c.1988, found in the artist’s studio
Fig. 3
Enlargement of a classified ad, c.1988, found in the artist’s studio
classic for less money than self restoration. NOS parts.
Illness forces sale. $6500 obo. Dallas, TX. 214-745-1748.
NA14MM54A
1974 CADILLAC Limo. 90,000 miles. All the luxuries
front & rear stereo, heat & air, divider glass,
seats, $3500. Fly in and drive home. 919-537-4843.
M AiilMMKKR
18
Fig. 4
Untitled, 1988-89
Oil on linen
20 x 36 inches; 51 x 91 cm
Glueck isn’t alone in linking the car paintings with carnal desires. Several rather
dated-feeling (and, well, very 1990s) entries in the Cain literature go straight for the
phallus, positing his rearrangement of car parts as a dismantling of societal con¬
structs of masculinity. 10 In this light, one might think of Mel Ramos’s crass pictorial
commercialism. Ramos’s buxom beauties have an irritating quality, shared by wax-
works, that makes you long for a hint of reality, some slight blemish to create a sense
of humanity. In comparison to Cain’s incongruously stirring paintings of vehicles,
these idealized nudes posing atop consumer products seem rather defanged.
*
And then came the single-wheel painting. Beginning in 1989, Cain started to ren¬
der cars that appeared to be radically transformed from the quotidian vehicles
seen on city streets and suburban highways. During this time, his subjects went
from discreetly finessed (a chassis slightly extended) to radically altered. Looked
at chronologically, this is the moment when all of his interests, and the ways in
which he applied them to canvas, clicked. The images that followed became icons
of his oeuvre. What seems to separate them from those that came before is a burst
in confidence and ambition. Within that one year his paintings nearly doubled in
scale, and the precision of his brushwork drastically increased, as seen in Untitled
(1989) [fig. 5], one of his first single-wheel paintings.
Each of the canvases features a car of some kind — a Mazda Miata, a Honda
Prelude, a Porsche Carrera — shown in profile, balancing atop one wheel, with its
passenger cabin completely removed so that the fender flows seamlessly into the
bumper. The background of Untitled is composed of a series of stripes, the side of
the road caught at high speed. Throughout the single-wheel works, Cain made
good use of the cars’ reflective surfaces — hoods, rims, fenders, windows, taillights
— as moments that would allow for greater painterly liberation, opportunities to
introduce new colors and more expressive brushwork. Before starting each
19
painting, he would concentrate on the form by making several finished sketches
and one meticulous “slow” drawing per painting.
In keeping with the logic of his earlier paintings, each of Cain’s newly recon¬
structed cars began as a print ad [fig. 6]. Selecting only cars featured in strict
profile, he would cut the magazine ad in two and then overlay the halves, sliding
each part toward the other until the front wheel and back wheel merged into one
[p. 4]. Taping these two halves into a collage, he would have color copies made
that he would trace and retrace, removing distracting details like the rising slope
of a windshield. He would then redraw this simple reduction, producing the
form that would appear in the final work. There’s an intuitive, homespun
approach to how he made these car-structures, though many reviews told a dif¬
ferent story, of these “mutants” being the product of some complicated process
of rearrangement or transmogrification.
By removing the passenger cab as well as the driver’s seat, Cain has negated
not only the purpose of the car’s existence but also its place in society and popular
culture, the widespread growth of which the automobile had helped enable fol¬
lowing World War II. 11 Removing the human aspect of the car, the fact that it
exists to serve us, is inherently unsettling — what would cars transport if not peo¬
ple, and why? In this way, Cain created a fleet of self-sufficient automatons not
unlike the replicants made famous in the 1982 film Blade Runner. Cain’s machines
give new meaning to the term “auto body.” His early sketches of fused cars bear a
notable likeness to Robert Gober’s drawings of enmeshed body parts, underscor¬
ing the importance of the human rather than the mechanical in Cain’s work.
As he examined hundreds of car ads from the 1950s to the 1990s, a new facet
of Cain’s work started to emerge. By selecting only cars shown passively in profile,
rather than examples seen actively twisting and turning through some bucolic or
urban landscape, he limited the humanity of his subject along with the viewer’s
potential empathy toward it. These images adhere to the strict frontality of mug
shots, allowing Cain to focus our attention on the shape and iconography of the
car so that in his work it becomes a sign without a signifier.
Critics have contended that Cain rotated some of his canvases — a la Georg
Baselitz — after the fact, as a way to further abstract what had already been taken apart
and reconfigured, to provide additional pictorial interest. Yet this gesture seems too
arbitrary within such a focused body of work. A photograph taken inside Cain’s
Bridgehampton studio (where he retreated when he became sober after years of sub¬
stance abuse) reveals a work in progress already facing the wrong side up [fig. 7].
This early period, from 1989 to 1993, is Cain’s most prolific; he had a solo exhi¬
bition each year, and his work was included in many group shows. His exhibition
history had an auspicious start in 1989 with an unofficial solo show at the Pat Hearn
Gallery. The legendary Hearn, alongside her partner, Colin de Land, was one of the
most respected and influential art dealers of the 1980s and 1990s. Hearn exhibited
many seminal artists early in their careers, including Mary Heilmann, Rosemarie
Trockel, Susan Hiller, MarkMorrisroe, Jimmy DeSana, Philip Taaffe, Jutta Koether,
Sophie Calle, Renee Green, Joan Jonas, Lutz Bacher, Laura Owens, and Steven
Parrino. Cain received his turn when artist Jack Pierson, who worked at Hearn’s
gallery at the time, recommended she visit Cain’s studio. Cain’s subsequent exhibi¬
tion, however, was located in her upstairs space, apart from the main gallery, and he
Fig. 5
Untitled, 1989
Oil on linen
58 x 70 inches; 147 x 178 cm
Fig. 6
Magazine advertisement, 1989, found in the artist’s studio
20
was understandably frustrated by his situation — a limbo of sorts in which Hearn
supported him to a degree but couldn’t manage to sell his work. 12
Although no eager buyers were lured upstairs, Cain’s paintings began to gen¬
erate a lot of glowingly positive press. He received his first magazine mention in
1990, from Jerry Saltz, one of his most vocal supporters to this day, who gleefully
described him as “tantalizingly difficult to classify, [...] a strange, unorthodox, and
odd young artist.” 13 And yet many other critics had no difficulty in quickly classi¬
fying Cain as either a Photorealist or a Pop painter in the vein of James Rosenquist.
Adding ammunition to this claim, his Pat Hearn show was accompanied by a
pointedly unfashionable (yet unexpectedly interesting, as was Hearn’s way) group
show in the main gallery that included Photorealists Robert Bechtle, Chuck Close,
Robert Cottingham, Malcolm Morley, and, curiously, Sigmar Polke.
Rosenquist makes for a sensible if obvious comparison: both artists took on
commercial objects as subjects and depicted them from unlikely viewpoints,
uncomfortably zoomed in. A work like Broome Street Trucks After Herman Melville
(1963) [fig. 8] is Photorealism avant la lettre, yet something is quite off. The lower
half of the painting utilizes only shades of yellow — like a tricolor print missing
the cyan and magenta — while the upper portion contains an additional canvas
layered on top, breaking up any remaining illusionism by emphasizing the paint¬
ing’s objecthood. Rosenquist’s methodology and subject matter, even within a
concentrated grouping of years, is fitful to say the least. If there is a connection
between the two artists, it relies upon their interest in commercial imagery (bill¬
boards for Rosenquist and, for Cain, their equivalent in modern printing) and the
methods through which it lures the consumer.
Regarded as a banal category for several decades now, Photorealism seems to
diminish the intrigue of any artwork stuck under its auspices, implying a one-note
21
attempt to achieve the look of mechanical reproduction with the human hand. A
more generative formal comparison might be found in the work of Konrad
Klapheck [fig. 9], yet Klapheck’s idealization of mechanized objects speaks more
to the rise of automation throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Cain’s work also calls to mind artists who use the human body and its accessories
as a means of abstraction, such as the Italian artist Domenico Gnoli and the unfor¬
tunately overlooked 1980s painter Alan Turner.
Tvo notebooks found in Cain’s studio after his death are particularly
enlightening, in terms of not only his intentions but also just how committed he
was to pushing his work forward. One, a pink notebook, reveals nuanced shifts
in scale and composition from painting to painting; without the use of digital
technology, working through such formal manipulations in one of his large-
scale works must have required months of patience and perseverance. The note¬
book contains diagrams of every painting, drawing, and photograph Cain created
since 1992, illustrating the composition and scale as well as the measurements
and color of each portion of the image [fig. 11]. When possible, Cain noted the
date each work was made.
The smaller, spiral-bound Clairefontaine notebook, the more humanizing of the
two, is dedicated to potential titles for future works, and it is brimming with ideas
— some used, others dismissed as “corny” or with a simple “no” [fig. 10]. This note¬
book is one of the most intimate artifacts to be found in Cain’s archive. While many
of his paintings are simply titled with a car’s model name and number, later in his
career he employed seemingly opaque titles tied to personal meanings. Some of the
delightfully campy ideas show a softer or even giddy side of Cain, either playing with
alliteration (LOS ANGELES LOVES LOVE) or indulging in the gay lore of classic
Hollywood films and their stars: RAVEN (FOR ALLEN LADD), named for the
male lead of the 1943 film noir This Gun for Hire, who played opposite Veronica
Lake; FRANCES GUMM, the birth name of Judy Garland; and MILDRED
PIERCE. GALAXIE 5000 is dedicated to beloved band Galaxie 500 (or perhaps the
1960s Ford sedan of the same name), while Cain’s amusement with contemporary
culture can be seen in the unused title TEENAGERS FOR CHASTITY.
Fig. 8
James Rosenquist
Broome Street Trucks After Herman Melville, 1963
Oil on linen
72 Vs x 7214 inches; 183 x 183 cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Fig. 9
Konrad Klapheck
Female Logic, 1965
Oil on canvas
4314 x 3514 inches; 110 x 190 cm
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
*
Cain was quoted in print only once during his lifetime. His words appeared in a
Klaus Kertess essay that was included in the press release for his 1991 exhibition
at Simon Watson. Aside from this one instance, there are very few primary sources
for his thoughts and feelings, his voice, most of which reside in the Cain archive
as short notes, memorandums, or guest lists with certain names crossed out. In a
discussion with Kertess, cofounder of Bykert gallery and one of the most influen¬
tial curators from the 1960s through the 1980s, Cain referred to Robert Ryman as
the artist he was most influenced by:
In an effort to bring some verbal order to the mesmerized discomfort I felt
in front of Peter Cain’s work, I asked him what he thought his paintings
were related to. “They could be like Robert Ryman,” he offered; and then,
after a consequent pause, he added, “but they’re obviously of something.” 14
22
Fig. 10
Titles, c. 1993-96
Ink and graphite on paper in
spiral-bound notebook,
11 pages
4% x 3% inches; 12 x 8 cm
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23
Cain’s response stopped Kertess in his tracks. Though he did confirm that Ryman
and Cain are both traditional easel painters who share an obsession with “the
means and medium of the acts of painting,” Kertess had already formulated an
idea that Cain’s paintings were more related to the work of Duchamp, Kafka,
Richter, and de Sade. In looking back at the cultural terrain of the time, it makes
sense that Cain would have Ryman on the brain: in 1988 the Dia Center for the
Arts in Chelsea mounted a large-scale exhibition of Ryman’s paintings that would
remain on view for nine months. 15
Cain’s fascination with the process of painting, and his sensitivity to the form,
was lost on several critics who fixated on the work’s surface and facture. (Despite
the praise many writers bestowed upon his convincing application of the airbrush,
he never actually used one. 16 ) Other writers were willing to dig deeper. On the
occasion of his 1991 Simon Watson show, New York Times critic Roberta Smith
wrote that Cain’s paintings “elicit a visceral response, seeming creepily deformed
or hybridized, shockingly sightless and limbless, like the automotive equivalent of
blind mole rats.” 17 Another reviewer rather smartly mentioned J. G. Ballard, spe¬
cifically his novel Crash . 18
Cain’s 1991 exhibition received wide coverage and secured a place for the young
artist within the New York art scene. He was increasingly featured in prominent
exhibitions and mainstream media, including a spread in Elle Decor and even an item
in a New York Post gossip column. 19 Achieving another hallmark of artistic success in
1990s New York, his work became a go-to selection for the curator of the moment,
Christian Leigh, “the most flamboyant of the independent curators who had risen to
prominence with the bull market of the 1980s.” 20 Cain was included in “Slittamenti,”
the big-budget mishmash of a group exhibition in Venice that — though no one
realized it at the time — would be the swan song of the larger-than-life Leigh.
While his name may not ring a bell to young art followers today, for a certain gen¬
eration any mention of Leigh is an invitation to spin a good old-fashioned yarn.
Cain, in fact, was included in several of Leigh’s exhibitions (most named after
Hitchcock films, for no apparent reason aside from the theater of it all).
Within two years Cain had moved beyond depicting cars in the profile format
for which his paintings had become known. The change irked some of the writers
who reviewed his first exhibition at Matthew Marks, in 1993. The new paintings
were based upon the 1992 Mercedes-Benz SL [pp. 63-67], a car that had quickly
become a favorite for image-conscious professionals. Cain’s notebook of finished
works shows that each of the paintings varied by incredibly precise increments [fig.
11]. Such subtle shifts reveal two important things: first, his analog-age resolve to
make a work by hand in order to see how it would read in person and, second, his
interest, since the beginning of his practice, in abstraction over representation.
These works, when viewed together as a suite of five paintings, illustrate his ability
to tweak a recognizable image just to the edge of disintegration.
In 1993, a seemingly difficult year in the studio, Cain made very few paint¬
ings. Those he did make, a series of six small-scale grisaille paintings of vintage
cars, appear to be relatively straightforward portraits [pp. 81-87]. They were fin¬
ished in 1994. At least two are based on black and white photocopies of classified
ads blown up to the point of losing their detail, the halftone printing and visible
Benday dots rendering the car soft and hazy. The euphemism “transitional work”
Fig. 11
Page from Peter Cain’s notebook of finished works
5oO SL
’. qilWEL 1- I11Z.
3" t'
Bie/vJM'/il 11 S 3
24
could be applied here, yet this 1994 series, created for an exhibition at Daniel
Weinberg Gallery in San Francisco, seems to be more of a placeholder, based
upon older images Cain had pulled from his files to keep himself occupied.
*
New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a battleground. The AIDS
epidemic decimated countless communities and families. It was clearly a time for
action: by 1990, deaths caused by AIDS-related illness had surpassed thirty thou¬
sand; Jesse Helms and his Republican brethren had become real threats to artistic
freedom and the National Endowment for the Arts; women’s reproductive rights
were also at stake. In a particularly electric 1990 episode of the Phil Donahue
show, an incredulous audience listened as AIDS activist Ann Northrop sternly
tried to get them to realize that at the heart of the AIDS epidemic was a “virus that
is spreading out of control because George Bush and the American people are
afraid of talking about sex.”
Watson, Cain’s former gallerist, was an active member of AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power (ACT UP); his goal for his Lafayette Street enterprise was to
devote the space to multidisciplinary social practices that would be funded through
sales of works by artists who were responding to the political climate. He had
previously run Baskerville+Watson, which fit the classic gallery model and
mounted exhibitions with artists such as Sherrie Levine and Carroll Dunham.
Some of the artists he showed at his new space made work that responded to the
era directly, while others, like Cain, used more conceptual means.
Detractors and lazy interpreters alike were quick to pigeonhole Cain’s work as
a comment on (and product of) commodity culture — a rather facile argument
dependent on the work’s medium and source material (painting, cars). Yet when
one imagines seeing this work for the first time in lower Manhattan in 1989,
knowing that Cain was the all-American (gay) boy that everyone wanted to be
with, his paintings quickly start to sear. Like much of the art being made within
the LGBTQ community at that time, his work spoke from a place of profound
sexuality, sensuality, and fear, yet through his automotive stand-ins he held all of
that at a remove. These perfect, erotically charged machines are closed off to the
world outside. Weirdly sterile and completely impenetrable, they are, as Watson
succinctly put it, “eroticism caught in amber.”
Young artists emerging at this time were part of a generation of individuals
who were deeply wounded, bereft at the staggering presence of death and loss in
their daily lives; society was largely against them, especially government officials,
who stigmatized vast swaths of young Americans for loving who they wanted to
love. Artworks that reached the heart of this moment lay bare an overwhelming
feeling of displacement. Cain, at the peak of his youth and vitality, did everything
he could to navigate that world. We can see him accessing what it felt like to be
alive and scared during that catastrophic moment in time.
If there is a landmark art event of that era, it is the 1993 Whitney Biennial. In a
sense, the Biennial — a show that elicited countless reviews (both emotive and dis¬
missive) and hundreds of college papers for decades to come — picked up where the
culture wars surrounding the cancellation of Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition at
25
the Corcoran Gallery of Art had left off. Now synonymous with identity politics,
the exhibition included polarizing political work as well as cultural fragments many
considered not to be art at all, most notably a videotape shot by a bystander, George
Holliday, of four LAPD officers beating an unarmed black man, Rodney King,
nearly to death. To put it plainly, many critics reviled the exhibition. As Michael
Kimmelman famously wrote in The New York Times , “I hate the show.”
Of the two Cain paintings curator Elisabeth Sussman selected for the Biennial,
EB 110 ( 1993) [p. 73] is arguably Cain’s masterwork. It was based upon a print ad for
the Bugatti EB110, a model named after the luxury car company’s founder, Ettore
Bugatti, who was born exactly 110 years before its debut in 1991 [fig. 12]. 21 Cain’s
auto, with its sharp, vivid-blue angles, recalls the race cars of F-Zero, the ground¬
breaking early-1990s video game. Set in the year 2560, the game’s premise is that
intergalactic trade billionaires, desperate for entertainment, have fused Formula One
cars with hovercrafts. Suspended upside down, presumably defying gravity with its
sheer velocity, Cain’s car inspires a sense of dystopian futurism.
One of the most memorable views of the exhibition depicts the painting
looming behind Charles Ray’s indelible work Family Romance (1993) [fig. 22].
Paired together were two mutants, a castrated sports car and an atomic family, the
latter rendered nude in fiberglass and paint, with each standing figure scaled to the
same stature, such that the patriarch’s height is the same as his toddler daughter’s.
The brilliance of the juxtaposition was lost on many Biennial attendees. One critic
stupidly joked that Ray’s family probably drove to the Whitney in Cain’s car.
A photograph taken from the opposite angle shows a Cain painting of a dif¬
ferent persuasion, the pristine 500 SL #1 (1992) [p. 63] looming directly in the line
of sight of Ray’s nuclear family, their pale, gleaming asses blocking the view [fig.
13]. The pairing became a conflation of flesh and metal, man-made mutations and
innate human desires. Both works illustrate the very current idea of queering het¬
erosexual norms. Moreover, both artworks negate the very things that make their
subjects identifiable: What is a Mercedes without its logo? If each family member
is the same size, who holds the power?
Since the 1993 Whitney exhibition, Cain’s work has largely been left out of
even the most revisionist histories of the 1990s. As highly polished, skillfully exe¬
cuted representational paintings, his work did not fit the mold of the time, with its
Photoconceptualism, text-based work, and abject sculpture. Likewise, his paint¬
ings did not wear any of their theoretical underpinnings on their sleeve. Several
artists and curators interviewed for this essay brought up — unprompted — the
negative feelings Cain’s peers had toward his work in the 1990s, most likely
inspired by his daunting skill and the allure of his paintings, qualities that were
then out of fashion. In a way, Cain’s works were just slightly too early for their
time, preceding by just a few years the embrace of figurative painting that valued
subjective vision over representation, as brought to the fore by artists such as
Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, and John Currin.
Recently the tide has started to turn for Cain. Both popular culture and the art
world have come to fixate on the 1990s for two obvious reasons: one, the landscape
of the 1980s has already been excavated, leaving curators to look elsewhere for
potential rediscoveries; and, two, millennials are quick to revisit the culture they
were slightly too young to experience. One could argue that this reconsideration
Fig. 12
Magazine pages, c.1991, found in the artist’s studio
26
Fig. 13
View of the 1993 Whitney Biennial.
From front: Charles Ray, Family Romance,
1993. Peter Cain, 500 SL #1 , 1992 [p. 63]
was partly kindled by the 2013 exhibition “1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and
No Star” at the New Museum in New York. There, Cain’s Pathfinder (1993) [p. 69]
was paired with works by Nayland Blake and Sarah Lucas. One year later the paint¬
ing was acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago. Regarding the acquisition, the
museum’s director, James Rondeau, emphasized the “absolute necessity of getting
behind the inclusion of Peter Cain” in art-historical narratives of the 1990s. 22
*
In 1995 a man began to appear in Cain’s work. He was Sean LeClair, Cain’s
boyfriend, who he had recently met on a trip to Florida. Various drawings of
LeClair appeared in exhibitions and catalogues, though there was no clear indi¬
cation what these works had to do with Cain’s cars, nor what had caused the shift
in subject matter.
Cain’s 1995 exhibition at Matthew Marks, his last in his lifetime, was a sur¬
prisingly revelatory and even intimate affair. No, the paintings didn’t divulge
details about Cain’s personal life, and the press release was nothing out of the
ordinary. In his New York Times review, Pepe Karmel insisted that the line draw¬
ings of Sean were “more seductive than anything else in the show.” The checklist
alone reveals that Cain was busy, maybe even overwhelmed — he had also been
selected by his unstinting supporter Kertess for that year’s Whitney Biennial, an
odd choice considering his prime placement the previous installment. So there
were paintings he had to make for the Whitney as well as his gallery show timed
27
to the Biennial. In retrospect, the Matthew Marks exhibition had a peculiar air to
it; the work was strong yet stiff, and there was little of it.
One of the newest paintings to be included in the show, Glider (1995) [p. 101],
features an orange car reduced to one large taillight spanning the entire machine,
the wheel wells protruding from both sides over a horizontally split background.
The most noteworthy aspect of the work is the brushwork making up the long
singular taillight. The paint handling is somewhere between quick and jubilant, a
first for Cain and a welcome contrast to the tight handling in the rest of the paint¬
ing. Up close, the light reflected off the red plastic reads like six quickly impro¬
vised approximations of an acidic Mark Rothko. Something was changing for him.
Cain spent 1995 and 1996 preparing for his fourth one-person exhibition in
New York, his third at Matthew Marks, which was set to open in early 1997. One
can imagine the pressure he was under, seeing the necessity of proving himself
after all the attention that had been paid to his focus on cars. He finished his new
work for the exhibition by December. At the end of that month, he had a cerebral
hemorrhage, which was undiagnosed at the time. Feeling ill at home, he was
brought to Saint Vincent’s Hospital and Medical Center in Greenwich Village,
where he entered into a coma. Three days later, on January 5, 1997, he died.
Cain’s death was particularly difficult to grasp, or even to believe, not just
because he was so full of vitality, youth, and promise; even after his death his pres¬
ence lingered. His exhibition at Matthew Marks was slated to open less than a
month after his passing, forcing Marks to make a decision about whether to pro¬
ceed and how best to remember Cain. The exhibition opened as planned. Despite
an added section memorializing the artist’s absence, it felt as if there was some
chance he was stuck in traffic on the way to his opening and would eventually
show up. A picture of Cain, very much alive, standing among eighteen of his
Fig. 14
David Armstrong, Peter Cain, and Sean LeClair, 1995
28
Fig. 15
Peter Cain (center) on the roof of 513-23 W 24th St, 1996,
with (from left) Nayland Blake, Brice Marden, Robert
Longo, Gary Simmons, Vinoodh Matadin, Inez van
Lamsweerde, John Miller, Matt Mullican, Nan Goldin,
Louise Lawler, Cain, David Armstrong, Vito Acconci,
Cindy Sherman, Ronald Jones, Gary Hill, Laurie
Simmons, Matthew Barney, Tony Oursler
artist-peers, appeared in The New Yorker the same week he died [fig. 15]. Marking
the opening of 513-23 West 24th Street, a building housing Barbara Gladstone,
Matthew Marks, and Metro Pictures, the photograph, taken by Eric Boman, fea¬
tured many of the artists who were represented by the three galleries. With its
expansive Chelsea horizon uncannily free of the crass condominiums that now
dominate the once-desolate neighborhood, the image becomes a document of a
time not quite fully gone by, but mostly.
The press release for Cain’s posthumous exhibition referred to his new subject
matter as a “radical departure,” and rightly so; it noted that Cain had in essence
taken up the much more traditional themes of landscape and portraiture. 23 Without
a car in sight, the exhibition consisted of his two new series of works: the Sean
paintings [pp. 115, 121, 127] and what have become known as the Los Angeles
paintings [pp. 139-41, 145-49]. Based upon photographs taken by Cain, most
likely from the vantage of a passenger seat, the six Los Angeles paintings depict
nondescript storefronts and gas stations (three of each). 24
The show was met with great enthusiasm and melancholy. Many critics were
quick to call it his best yet, while noting that the occasion was incredibly difficult.
Art critic Peter Schjeldahl, writing for The Village Voice, praised the exhibition:
“Now we see the beginning of the fulfillment of [Cain’s promising] painterly gifts
and obvious ambition in the same instant as its end: an exceptional talent nipped
in mid-blossoming, just short of full bloom.” Schjeldahl described the feeling and
mood surrounding the exhibition most succinctly: “It makes for a singularly awk¬
ward occasion of celebration and mourning, hail and farewell.” 25
29
The common narrative employed by writers after Cain’s death was that in the
last year of his life he had had a breakthrough that resulted in the creation of this
stunning, career-making work just as, sadly, his career ended. More accurately,
Cain had begun his Sean drawings in 1995, including them in his exhibition at
Matthew Marks and in his section of the 1995 Biennial catalogue. His doing away
with cars was a methodical and measured venture rather than an impetuous stroke
of passion. The aforementioned portraits — based upon his 1995 drawings, con¬
sisting of three exquisite paintings of Sean — were a commanding shift in his
practice. This evolution was entirely shocking, but the organizing principles of
the work — defamiliarizing something we think we have a firm grasp of — were
undeniably Cain’s.
Immediately noticeable, the Los Angeles paintings do not contain any logos
or typography; all of the signs have been emptied of their original content. Archival
materials show that the original photographs were marked up, with some areas
enlarged for further editing of the composition [fig. 16]. While many words were
removed (or filled in, depending on one’s disposition), other details were simply
invented, a new tactic for the artist: a traffic cone added, the lines demarcating a
parking spot slightly tweaked.
You get the feeling that Cain experienced a kind of liberation within these
urban landscapes, equally desolate and teeming with activity. The paintings were
created through a palpable sense of freedom. His brushwork is exuberant, his
forms more peculiar than ever. A dense background of trees and shrubs in Untitled
Number Four (1996) [p. 141] calls to mind Dunham’s figures from the same time
period and also foreshadows Dana Schutz’s confident palette some seven years
later. Even the brushwork of the painted asphalt in Texaco (1996) [fig. 17] recalls
the quick, dry brushstrokes of Cain’s earliest painting, the sense of liberation
stemming from self-assuredness. The Los Angeles paintings carry the significance
I I
Fig. 16
Study for Untitled Number Four, 1996
C-print and collage mounted on board
10Vs x 14% inches; 26 x 38 cm
Fig. 17
Texaco, 1996
Oil on canvas
37 x 57 inches; 94 x 145 cm
30
Fig. 18
Peter Cain’s CD collection in his studio
and weight of the last works produced by the artist, representing all of the works
that could have been made had he lived.
Two weeks after Cain’s death, a photographer documented his studio before
anything in it had been disturbed [pp. 6-13]. As Goldin said in her eulogy at Cain’s
memorial, it “looked like he’d just stepped out for a few minutes to buy more
bananas.” Death provides unparalleled access. It takes everything from one’s per¬
sonal life and renders it public. Beginning with the posthumous photos of the
studio, it’s important to make a distinction between what Cain would and would
not have allowed us to see (i.e., what he considered art and what he considered
ephemera) were he still alive. Several unfinished works were found in the studio
after his death.
The studio photos are incredibly telling documents of the artist’s inner world.
His studio CD collection offers a lovely picture of Cain as someone who kept up
with what was hip at the time but also had his own personal taste: Nirvana, Sonic
Youth, King Tubby, Hank Williams, Princess Superstar, some rock classics including
Janis Joplin, and plenty of campy show tunes and gay nostalgia trips [fig. 18]. A box
of saltines can be seen lying open on a table; a bag from the MoMA gift shop affixed
with a delivery label sits on the floor near a pea-green Naugahyde armchair with a
tom seat. Above Cain’s drafting table is a cork bulletin board with several images and
objects hanging from it; they include a photograph of Sean as a boy tacked next to a
picture of a Sean painting, a photo of a car painting, and, nearby, an iconic Manet
painting that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, The Dead Christ with Angels (1864).
*
31
A few of the individuals interviewed for this essay scoffed at the notion of consid¬
ering the 1990s as a historical subject. Cain’s death has confined his entire artistic
output to that era, leaving it innocent of not only the global atrocities that have
occurred since but also the triumphs we have come to take for granted. Twenty
years on, when driverless cars are becoming a reality and photographs can be shot,
altered, and disseminated instantaneously, Cain’s iconic subjects have become less
burdened with meaning. Today, in a historical moment that seems increasingly
foreign, Cain’s three distinct series — the cars, the Sean pictures, and Los Angeles
landscapes — offer up his ability to abstract the quotidian while discreetly pushing
the boundaries of painting.
Saturday Disaster, the title of a 1995 car painting, was lifted from a painting in
Andy Warhol’s early Disaster series [fig. 19]. Warhol’s 1964 work contains two
of mangled bodies after a ghastly car wreck, while
Cain’s presents the tail end of a green car as if it were sinking nose-first into some
body of water. The appropriation of the title says much about his ambition to be
worthy of Warhol’s influence. Yet the contradictory title phrase — a day of relax¬
ation and freedom conflated with misfortune and tragedy — could also describe
Cain’s final years. Stopped short just as it was growing in self-assurance and per¬
spicacity, the true nature of his work remains undetermined, each painting a pos¬
sible relic to be imbued with meaning — a bittersweet consolation.
Fig. 19
Andy Warhol
Saturday Disaster, 1964
Synthetic polymer paint and
silk-screen ink on canvas
119 x 82 inches; 302 x 208 cm
Rose Museum at Brandeis University
large silk-screened images
NOTES
1. David Carr and Robert Ryman, “Robert Ryman on the Origins of His Art,” Burlington Magazine
139, no. 1134 (September 1997), pp. 632-33. Cited in Suzanne R Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
2. Michael Kimmelman, “A Quirky Whitney Biennial,” The New York Times , March 24, 1995.
3. Carroll Dunham, “Head Over Wheels,” Artforum, April 1997, pp. 19-20.
4. Angela Stewart, “Peter Cain, 37, Rising Young Artist,” Sunday Star Ledger, January 7, 1997, p. 21.
5. Frank Camarda in conversation with the author, August 28, 2016.
6. Scott Rothkopf, “Paul Thek and the Sixties Surreal,” in Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky,
Paul Thek: Diver (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 46-55.
7. Simon Watson in conversation with the author, August 18, 2016.
8. Nan Goldin, eulogy for Peter Cain delivered at the Whitney Museum of American Art, March 10,
1997.
9. Grace Glueck, “Review: Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery,” New York Observer, January 18, 1993.
10. Simon Taylor, “Peter Cain at Simon Watson,” Art in America, November 1991, pp. 150-51.
11. See Bob Nickas’s take on Cain’s removal of the human, “Re-Make/Re-Model: The Car Paintings
of Peter Cain” in Peter Cain: More Courage and Less Oil (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2002).
Robert Moor recently limned the potential effects of driverless cars on American society in “What
Happens to American Myth When You Take the Driver Out of It? The Self-Driving Car and the
Future of the Self,” New York Magazine, October 17-30, 2016, p. 36.
12. Carroll Dunham in conversation with the author, August 13,2016. While there are slides of Cain’s
work in the Pat Hearn Gallery Archives at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, there are
no mentions of Cain’s show.
13. Jerry Saltz, “Wild Thing,” Arts Magazine, March 1990, pp. 13-14.
14. Klaus Kertess, “Cartography,” exhibition brochure (New York: Simon Watson, 1991).
15. “Robert Ryman,” October 7, 1988-June 18, 1989, Dia Center for the Arts, New York.
16. See Glueck, op. cit. Also Tony Raczka, “Defamiliarizing an American Icon,” Artweek, November 15,
1990, pp. 14-15.
17. Roberta Smith, “Review: Peter Cain at Simon Watson,” The New York Times, May 17, 1991.
18. Joshua Decter, “Review: Peter Cain at Simon Watson,” Arts Magazine, September 1991, p. 77. David
Cronenberg’s movie adaptation of Ballard’s novel was released in the US a few months after Cain’s death.
19. Cain crossed the lowbrow paper’s threshold thanks to Cindy Adams and her gossip column. Adams
supposedly started a feud between Cain and longtime friend Jack Pierson by reporting that the popular
band the Black Crowes had shot a music video at Pierson’s West 42nd Street loft, when they had actu¬
ally filmed at Cain’s new Bowery studio. “When both were on their behinds they were pals. Now
they’re up-and-coming. And rivals.” Cindy Adams, New York Post, December 1, 1992, p. 10.
20. Alexi Worth, “The Trouble with Christian: Whatever Happened to Christian Leigh,” Artforum,
March 2003.
21. For many years this work was erroneously titled EP110. The mistake was discovered and corrected
in 2016 during the creation of the artist’s online catalogue raisonne, www.petercain.org.
22. James Rondeau in conversation with the author, September 24, 2016.
23. Press release for the 1997 Matthew Marks exhibition.
24. Terry Myers offers insight into the source imagery in “Running on Full,” Peter Cain: The Los
Angeles Pictures (Cologne and New York: Galerie Aurel Scheibler and Matthew Marks Gallery, 2005).
25. Peter Schjeldahl, “Hail and Farewell,” The Village Voice, February 25, 1997.
33
Untitled, 1987
Oil on linen
42 Vs x 36Vi inches; 107 x 92 cm
34
Satellite, 1988
Oil on linen
90 x 34 inches; 229 x 86 cm
36
Untitled, 1988
Oil on linen
90 x 34 inches; 229 x 86 cm
Untitled, 1988
Oil on canvas
28 x 76 inches; 71 x 193 cm
38
Untitled, 1988
Oil on linen
20 x 36 inches; 51 x 91 cm
40
Untitled, 1988-89
Oil on linen
20 x 36 inches; 51 x 91 cm
Untitled, 1988-89
Oil on linen
35% x 79% inches; 91 x 203 cm
42
Untitled, 1989
Oil on linen
46 x 44 inches; 117x112 cm
44
Untitled, 1989
Oil on canvas
60 x 34 inches; 152 x 86 cm
46
Z, 1989
Oil on canvas
58 x 70 inches; 147 x 178 cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase,
with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee
48
Study for Z, 1989
Collage
10 % x 13 inches; 27 x 33 cm
50
Z, 1990
Graphite on paper
I 6 V 2 x 201/2 inches; 42 x 52 cm
Untitled, 1990
Oil on canvas
58 x 70 inches; 147 x 178 cm
52
Miata, 1990
Graphite on paper
22 x 31 inches; 56 x 78 cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Gift of Richmond Burton in memory of Peter Cain
54
Miata, 1990
Graphite on paper
291/2 x 1714 inches; 75 x 44 cm
Prelude #3, 1990
Oil on linen
85 x 48 inches; 216 x 122 cm
56
Prelude #1, 1990
Oil on linen
102 x 48 inches; 259 x 122 cm
58
Carrera #4, 1990
Graphite on paper
20 x 23 7 /s inches; 51 x 61 cm
60
Carrera 911 Turbo #1, 1991
Oil on canvas
58 x 70 inches; 147 x 178 cm
500 SL #1, 1992
Oil on linen
67 x 70 inches; 170 x 178 cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau
62
Study for 500 SL #5, 1991
Collage
8 V 2 x 8% inches; 22 x 21 cm
Study for 500 SL #3, 1991
Collage
8 V 2 x 8% inches; 22 x 21 cm
64
500 SL #5, 1991
Graphite on paper
24 x 24 inches; 61 x 61 cm
500 SL #2, 1992
Oil on linen
67 x 70 inches; 170 x 178 cm
66
Pathfinder, 1993
Oil on linen
92 x 93 inches; 234 x 236 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago.
Through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin E. Hokin
68
Pathfinder, 1991
Graphite on paper
26 x 26 inches; 66 x 66 cm
70
EB no, 1993
Graphite on paper
291/2 x 35% inches; 75 x 91 cm
EB 110, 1993
Oil on linen
90 x 110 inches; 229 x 279 cm
72
Coward, 1993
Oil on linen
83 x 63 inches; 211 x 160 cm
74
Coward, 1993
Graphite on paper
30 Vi x 22% inches; 77 x 58 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Judith Rothschild Foundation
Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift
76
Coward, 1993
Graphite on paper
30% x 22% inches; 77 x 58 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Judith Rothschild Foundation
Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift
Bonneville, 1993
Cibachrome mounted on aluminum
33 Vz x 32 inches; 85 x 81 cm
Mustang, 1992-94
Oil on linen
18 x 46 inches; 46 x 117 cm
80
Beaumont, 1992-94
Oil on linen
18 x 46 inches; 46 x 117 cm
82
Thunderbird, 1994
Oil on linen
18 x 46 inches; 46 x 117 cm
Charger, 1992-94
Oil on linen
18 x 46 inches; 46 x 117 cm
84
Continental, 1994
Oil on linen
18 x 46 inches; 46 x 117 cm
Toronado, 1994
Oil on linen
18 x 46 inches; 46 x 117 cm
Untitled, 1994-95
Cibachrome mounted on aluminum
40 x 30 inches; 102 x 76 cm
Saturday Disaster, 1994
Oil on linen
63 x 83 inches; 160 x 211 cm
90
Saturday Disaster, 1993
Graphite on paper
22 Vi. x 30 inches; 57 x 76 cm
92
The Little Colonel, 1993
Graphite on paper
48 x 4014 inches; 122 x 102 cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Purchase, with funds from the Drawing Committee
94
The Little Colonel, 1994
Oil on linen
67 x 51 % inches; 170 x 131 cm
Omega, 1994
Oil on linen
67 x 51 V 2 inches; 170 x 131 cm
96
mmjmL
Omega, 1992
Graphite on paper
38 7 /s x 28% inches; 99 x 73 cm
98
Omega, 1993
Graphite on paper
47 x 40 inches; 119 x 102 cm
Glider, 1995
Oil on linen
51 V 2 x 67 inches; 131 x 170 cm
100
The Gift, 1993
Graphite on paper
22% x 30 Vi; 58 x 77 cm
102
Study for Vanishing Point, 1996
Collage
12% x 7% inches; 31 x 20 cm
Study for Vanishing Point, 1996
Graphite on vellum
9 x 11 % inches; 23 x 30 cm
104
Vanishing Point, 1996
Cibachrome print
14x11 inches; 36 x 28 cm
Peter Cain, 1996
The Body of C
Collier Schorr
A painting of a real thing. I assume some painters love the feeling of canvas and
others want to remove it. Some cars, I think, are painted in a way to remove the
sense of metal, hardness, and other cars are painted in a way to accentuate the
fiberglass. The difference between shutting the door of a 1970s Barracuda and a
BMW today. You can probably tell who was born in the 1960s by the way they
slam a car door, used to the heaviness of steel, always surprised by the way new
doors practically shut themselves.
I was born in the 1960s. We didn’t have to wear seatbelts at first. The back
seat of my mother’s GTO was a giant maroon slippery vast vinyl canal. I have
written about that car many times over the years. Everything about it was bigger
faster heavier louder cooler than anyone else’s mother’s car in the entire state of
New Jersey. Gas station attendants, who I didn’t want to date but wanted to be,
oohed and ahhed over the car. It was the first car I felt was an extension of my
body, because it was driven by a woman and it was envied by men. Cars generally
didn’t seem to be extensions of women, women seemed at that time to be decora¬
tions, living hood ornaments. The door of this car was gigantic. Like the hood of
a normal car. So we were three, my mother and me and my brother in a big fast
gas-guzzling period-colored GOAT.
That’s part 1. Of course the car got sold, my parents got divorced, my mother
went to social-work school and got a Toyota Corolla. I got my father’s souped-up
Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. It had a modified 455-cubic-inch engine and racing
mag wheels, and even though it had four doors and corduroy seats, it was a ’79
Trans Am. I didn’t test its speed, but when I went to college my brother did, and
the car ended up in a lake. I did my own damage later, borrowing the Corolla
when my mother was on vacation and making a left-hand turn from the right lane
on Houston Street, crying over a breakup. It was raining, I was fucked. It was
1986.1 didn’t really drive again.
I remember Peter Cain’s paintings. They fit and didn’t fit with what I was
looking at at the time. I thought about the Mel Ramos painting I would see
passing by Louis K. Meisel Gallery. Never going in, we never went in. I was
working for Peter Halley and Richard Prince at the same time that Peter Cain
was obsessively painting cars. Peter Halley traded a painting to a collector for a
Porsche. I gave Richard Prince a book my father wrote on the Buick GNX.
Peter Halley made paintings in two parts with stripes, and Richard used house
paint to make a giant color-field painting with a thinner painting hung below it.
107
Almost like two-door cars. Sporty painting. The way in which works work off
each other is fascinating.
Richard told me about the writer Harry Crews and a book called Car. I wonder
if Peter Cain read Car. He must have, or I hope he did, because I’m mentioning it
here in hopes that someone will say, “Of course he read that. You aren’t just coming
up with some idea that is unrelated. This relates.” So, in Car a guy who feels over¬
powered by power, underwhelmed by his own performance, sets out to eat a car.
The story, as it turns out, somehow relates to Japan, because I could see this happen¬
ing in Japan, only it would involve ropes. Anyway, to eat a car, if you really doubt this
is possible, you have to cut it down. Into portions. Shrink it, deform it. To consume
it you have to reinvent it. Change its body. Change the scale, like how a painting of
a car no longer has the weight but maybe still has the impact.
My father, who is a renowned auto journalist, went to a book signing a few
years ago, and a girl came up with the door of a Camaro for him to sign. I’ve been
in a room where Charming Tatum signed a woman’s breasts.
Until I saw the book Peter Cain: The Los Angeles Pictures, I had no idea that he
looked like the kind of boys I liked in high school. The ones who didn’t pump gas
but wore Timberland ski hats and could have been mechanics except their hands
and hair were cleaner and they actually went skiing. I like to imagine I almost looked
like Peter, if I wasn’t Jewish and was a guy. I read Jack Pierson’s beautiful little essay
in the book, and he notes how handsome Peter was. Its wistful, this noting. It’s a
privilege, you can tell, when one gay man notes the beauty of another. Sigh. He was
both handsome and straight-looking. A kind of pinnacle. It counts in a different way.
It’s the gateway to everything. More than the handsome, though, is the boyish.
Paint, boy, car. Luxury. There is a luxury to this. It’s right that Jack, a photographer
and a mortal, would note this. Just another separation between photographers and
subjects and mortals and handsome men. This is a total aside, but I remember
talking to Jack at a Mark Morrisroe opening a few years ago, standing in front of a
nude self-portrait. I remarked to Jack, “That big dick must have come in handy,
must have really helped him in his life,” and Jack said, “Well, when he was tricking
a john shot him, and afterwards he had a limp, so I guess it didn’t help him in the
end.” It may have been the perfect story. The perfect Jack moment.
Peter Cain died in the age of people dying of AIDS, but he didn’t die from it.
I wonder how that serves his memorialization. Kind of interesting. He didn’t die
of AIDS, his work wasn’t part of a group, it wasn’t really gay-ish. In most reviews
of my work there is some note to my identification. I find it tedious. So I thought
about it when writing about Peter Cain. I didn’t want to do the same thing. So
that’s about it. If I write about loving boys or the look of boys or the trophies of
boys, it’s about me as much as it is about him. So it’s kind of a straight thing.
My brother slept in a fiberglass race-car bed until he was fourteen.
Muscle cars are American sculpture and painting and photography. I know
I was startled and excited when I first saw Peter’s work because it worshipped the
only religion our family had, the steel garish show-off monsters my father would
drive home every week. And suddenly what was half pride (how cool is that
Indianapolis pace car parked in our driveway), half fear (why is everyone else
driving a normal car that doesn’t scream), was suddenly a masterpiece. A thing
moved inside and hoisted up and gentled and softened and quiet. In the same
108
way one experienced one’s body when standing next to a Robert Morris or a
Richard Serra, I experienced my memory of form for the first time when seeing
a car that was not a car.
There is a term: Car Guy. It’s what people in the automotive business call the
people, usually men, who were there for the Detroit heyday. The Big Three
churning out these pure American dreams of power and freedom and expression.
My dad is a true Car Guy. And they love those cars. You don’t want to see pictures
of most of them. They weren’t drivers or teenagers, they were a kind of Mad Men,
but the radicals. It’s a particular time in American history when high performance,
aggression, trippy details, stoned-looking mascots, speed freaks, all that stuff was
under the control of big corporations that were reaching out to the new drivers
who were getting drafted or protesting the war. My dad, who edited a magazine
called CARS, would get letters from kids in Vietnam saying how they were saving
their pay to buy a Corvette. Meanwhile in Astoria, Queens, a kid called Chas
bought a ’67 Corvette from the infamous Motion Performance hot-rod shop in
Baldwin. He had an L88 engine dropped in and started to race it at drag strips. My
dad, who wrote all the advertising copy for the shop, photographed that car a lot.
It was a very fast car. Very. Eventually it broke the record, but that was after the
kid, known as Astoria Chas, was killed in Vietnam. One day my dad showed me
some of the pictures, because he realized that Chas, or Charlie as he was known
off the track, was my type. I agreed. He was really my type, a beautiful guy with
wavy brown hair and the confidence of a teen idol, or at least a guy who was very
happy being a guy. But my Dad had only a few pictures of the boy. “I didn’t care
about the guys driving the cars,” my dad said. “I just loved shooting the cars.”
109
Sean, 1995
Graphite and charcoal on Arches paper
22 Vz x 30 inches; 57 x 76 cm
110
Untitled, 1995
Graphite and charcoal on Arches paper
22% x 30 Vs inches; 58 x 77 cm
Sean, 1995
Graphite and charcoal on Rives BFK paper
22% x 30 inches; 58 x 76 cm
112
Sean Number One, 1996
Oil on linen
84 x 60 inches; 213 x 152 cm
114
Giant, 1995
Graphite and charcoal on Rives BFK paper
22% x 30 inches; 58 x 76 cm
116
Giant, 1995
Graphite and charcoal on Arches paper
221/2 x 30 inches; 57 x 76 cm
Giant, 1995
Graphite on paper
22% x 30 Vs inches; 58 x 77 cm
118
Sean Number Two, 1996
Oil on linen
60 x 84 inches; 152 x 213 cm
120
Los Angeles Loves Love, 1995
Graphite and charcoal on Rives BFK paper
30 x 22 3 /4 inches; 76 x 58 cm
122
Los Angeles Loves Love, 1995
Graphite and charcoal on paper
30 x 22% inches; 76 x 57 cm
Los Angeles Loves Love, 1995
Graphite on Arches paper
30 x 22 Va inches; 76 x 57 cm
124
Sean Number Three, 1996
Oil on linen
84 x 60 inches; 213 x 152 cm
126
Fig. 20
Study for Sean Number Two, 1995
Acrylic on C-print mounted on board
13x12 inches; 33 x 31 cm
The Last of Peter Cain
Richard Meyer
Death necessarily bounds and defines an artist’s career, retroactively designating
the sum of all previous works as an oeuvre. Death removes an artist from the con¬
temporary moment (in the most literal sense of contemporary as “living or occur¬
ring at the same time”) and seals him or her within the historical past. Critics have
understandably mourned the work that Peter Cain would have made if he had
lived. And that mourning has been all the more acute because the last works he
completed before his death marked a dramatic departure from everything that had
come before. Before turning to those last works, let me explain that by “every¬
thing that had come before” I mean cars — or, to be more precise, paintings of
cars. Cain’s earliest pictures offer views of cars in their entirety, but he was best
known for his subsequent paintings of automobiles compressed, elongated, frag¬
mented, or otherwise dramatically reconfigured.
To make these paintings, Cain would start with a magazine ad, cut it up, and
collage it back together, removing sections of an automobile (the back wheels, for
example, or the entire passenger compartment) and refashioning the remains into
a fantastical, if all but functionless, new model. For all the distortions he wrought
on them, Cain’s cars rarely seem as though they have been violently severed from
a larger whole. Nor do they ever look dented, bruised, or demolished, in the man¬
ner of a John Chamberlain sculpture. Cain’s recombinant machines appear instead
as gleaming objects complete in themselves, newfangled automotive mutants or
hybrids (if that term can be reclaimed from today’s eco-friendly equivalent) beck¬
oning our visual attention.
With Pathfinder (1993) [p. 69] Cain offers, in side view, the radically recon¬
ceived body of a Nissan SUV. Rather than resting on four wheels, the vehicle now
stands, impressively if improbably, on one. Fittingly, this wheel is its spare tire —
the one generally not in use (and therefore attached to the tailgate). The artist
Jack Pierson once characterized Cain’s pictures as “contemporary cars
Frankenstein-ed into Cyclops in a highly skilled, photorealistic manner.” 1 I like
this description and would add to it only that, in contrast to Frankenstein, the
stitches of Cain’s beautiful monsters never show. The surgery has happened, as it
were, out of frame, in the preliminary collages, sketches, and detailed drawings
through which Cain plotted and perfected his compositions [fig. 21]. The surgery
also happened, of course, in the artist’s mind. A friend of his told me that he did as
much planning as painting, which is to say that the paintings were as much a mat¬
ter of Cain’s imagination as of his technical process.
129
The artist’s peak moment of public visibility came with his inclusion in the
1993 Whitney Biennial [fig. 22]. His “roommate” in the exhibition was Charles
Ray, as represented by Family Romance (1993), a painted fiberglass sculpture in
which a father, mother, little boy, and infant girl have been rendered, with ana¬
tomic exactitude, in the nude — exact, that is, save for the astonishing fact of their
identical height: the parents have been shrunk and the infant expanded such that
the whole family now matches the height of the little boy, the only figure who
retains a realistic size for his age. As more than one critic suggested at the time,
Ray’s uncomfortably exposed and impossibly equalized family would have been
the perfect inhabitants for Cain’s mutant and compacted automobiles.
The Whitney’s 1993 exhibition was widely discussed by critics at the time,
and almost as widely attacked, as the “identity politics” or “PC” Biennial. The
show included more women, people of color, and queer artists than any in the
museum’s history. But it was not simply the newfound visibility of underrepre¬
sented communities that provoked controversy — and, in many cases, consterna¬
tion. It was the fact that so much of the work on display confronted issues of race,
gender, and sexuality, including the urgency of the AIDS crisis and the institu¬
tional racism of museums. Perhaps the signature piece was Daniel J. Martinez’s
reworking of the Whitney’s admission tags, worn by every visitor upon entry. For
the duration of the biennial, the tags were imprinted with all or part of the sen¬
tence “I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE.”
I was working at the Whitney in 1993 as a tour guide so as to supplement my
(shall we say) modest income as a graduate student while writing an art-history
dissertation. I remember thinking of the gallery shared by Ray and Cain as a kind
of straight-boy ghetto, assuming, erroneously as it turned out, that any painter so
fixated on automobiles must have been heterosexual, and normatively so at that.
Not unrelatedly, perhaps, I typically skipped over Cain’s paintings when I led
tours of the exhibition. I had never been into cars.
What I failed to recognize at the time was the value of Cain’s refusal of polit¬
ical correctness in favor of a commitment to the medium and history of painting.
His paintings remember and rework the legacies of Photorealism, Color Field
painting, Pop, Finish Fetish, and Surrealism. If that struck me as aesthetically
retrograde (or, perhaps worse, masculinist) in the 1990s, it now seems audacious.
At the height of identity politics, Cain had no interest in making art about identity
or revealing himself in any transparent or confessional manner. This hardly meant,
however, that his identity was not marked by difference.
It was not until I was invited to write this essay that I learned about Cain’s life
as an emerging artist in New York City during the 1990s — that, for example, he
circulated within a downtown, largely queer art scene alongside friends and fellow
artists such as Pierson, David Armstrong, and Nan Goldin. That, for a time, he
dated an East Village drag queen and makeup artist named Misdemeanor (Misty,
for short). That he enjoyed the occasional Joan Crawford movie no less than his
monthly Car and Driver magazine. That he was all-American in looks yet shy, even
socially awkward. That he identified above all as a painter yet refused to talk about
his paintings.
After completing fifty-six paintings across eight years, Cain turned away from
the subject matter of cars, focusing instead on the urban landscape of Los Angeles,
Fig. 21
Study for Pathfinder, 1992
Collage
8Vb x 8Vz inches; 23 x 22 cm
130
Fig. 22
View of the 1993 Whitney Biennial.
From left: Charles Ray, Family
Romance, 1993. Peter Cain, EB 110,
1993 [p. 73]. Peter Cain, Pathfinder,
1993 [p. 69]
a landscape that is, of course, inextricable from cars [pp. 136-49]. As with his pic¬
tures of driverless automobiles, however, Cain’s paintings of Los Angeles gas sta¬
tions and mini-malls are swept clean of people, not to mention cars (save for
reflections in plate-glass windows). They likewise erase all text and logos from the
ubiquitous commercial signage, presenting Los Angeles as an empty wonderland
of geometry and color.
In the midst of working on the Los Angeles landscapes, Cain initiated a new
series of paintings. They marked the entrance, monumentally, of the human fig¬
ure into his pictorial world — or rather, of one figure in particular: his boyfriend
Sean. There are only three paintings in the series — Sean Number One, Sean
Number Two, and Sean Number Three (all 1996) — and no indication that the artist
intended more. All three derive from a series of photographs Cain took on a beach
in Fort Lauderdale in 1994 [fig. 20]. He shot them from a position directly adja¬
cent to Sean — which is to say, lying on a neighboring towel on the sand.
In two of the paintings {Sean Number One and Sean Number Three) Cain
rotates our perspective ninety degrees clockwise, shifting the orientation of his
boyfriend’s prone body from horizontal to vertical [fig. 23]. This reorientation of
the larger-than-life-size figure is reminiscent of the upending of the SUV in
Pathfinder, though without the “Frankenstein-ed” mutations of form. In Sean
Number One we are positioned so close to the figure that we see only the side of
his head (with the face cropped out) and neck, along with some sand, sky, foliage,
a telephone pole, and a bit of loosely painted architecture. Sean Number Three
pulls back somewhat to encompass a profile of Sean’s entire head as well as his
shoulders and (arguably) a bit of chest. The painting’s background, almost entirely
taken up by sky, suggests that our view of the scene has slid to the left, away from
the distant foliage in Sean Number One.
Sean Number Two, the painting on which I will focus in closest detail, changes
our view yet again, sliding back to the right such that we see a great deal more
131
foliage but no architecture or telephone poles. Rather than framing Sean in strict
profile, Cain captures him at an oblique angle, from below and behind. Sean lifts
his head off the towel, perhaps to look at the water, and we see his shoulders, neck,
upper back, most of his head, and a fractional view of his nose, forehead, and left
eye. But what we see most spectacularly is his sun-bleached ponytail, which
becomes, in Cain’s hands, a lovely cascade of intertwined strands of pigment. The
near vertical of the ponytail divides the composition into two uneven sections: a
larger “Sean zone” to the left and a smaller “nature zone” to the right.
The upward tilt of Sean’s head allows the ponytail to unfurl in all its visual
splendor. In the other two paintings, by contrast, the bleached-blond strands are
confined to a slender column of space between the towel and the body, and the
ponytail, like the man to whom it belongs, seems to be in repose. In Sean Number
Two, however, the ponytail has been raised and repositioned to suggest motion,
the pull of gravity, a spiraling downward toward the sand. Paradoxically, the lon¬
ger one looks at Sean’s ponytail, the less hairlike (or unambiguously hairlike) it
appears. The interwoven brown and yellow filaments of paint seem as much like
stalks of straw or spirals of pasta as they do strands of hair. But neither straw nor
pasta nor hair is quite right, because none of these references capture the particu¬
lar texture and intricate overlays of color and line that constitute this passage of
the painting. As I struggled with this instability, I began to focus on something I
had not noticed before: the slivers of sky and pocket of sand that peek through
the brown and yellow strands. When viewed at close range, these tiny apertures
not only contribute to the formal fascination of the ponytail but also remind us
that we are seeing an arrangement of painted shapes and colors on canvas before
we are seeing sky or sand or hair. What we are seeing, in other words, is the play
of abstraction.
Cain’s tendency toward abstraction surfaces even more strongly in his
treatment of the birthmarks strewn across the expanse of Sean’s shoulders.
Although these marks are of varying circumference, they all share the same
matte-brown flatness. As we move closer to the painting’s surface, they come to
seem less epidermal than optical, less a matter of sun-damaged skin than of oil
paint and geometry.
I remained confused by Cain’s treatment of the birthmarks until I compared
Sean Number Two with the source photograph on which it is based. Each brown
spot in the painting corresponds to a specific mark on Sean’s body, but Cain has
darkened its brownness and buffed away the patchy inconsistencies of texture and
color. The small disks of unmodulated brown paint appear against the pink ground
of Sean’s skin like dots to be connected or points of a constellation to be traced.
Visible yet seemingly insignificant in the photograph, these birthmarks become
epic in the painting. They pull away from physiognomic believability to become
an abstract, nearly astral pattern in their own right.
Cain reportedly did not like being called a Photorealist, and with good rea¬
son. Upon viewing a painting like Sean Number Two firsthand, it becomes clear
how much it departs from the reality effects of photography. I agree with the critic
Jerry Saltz, who wrote, “Cain’s great accomplishment is that although all of his
paintings derive from photographs, none of them picture the world as if seen
through a lens.” 3
Fig. 23
Sean Number Three in Peter Cain’s 13th Street studio, 1996
132
I have suggested some of the ways in which Sean Number Two departs from
“the world as if seen through a lens” even as it relies upon and reimagines its pho¬
tographic source image. In researching the Sean series, I encountered multiple
photographs of Sean from that day at the beach. As I looked at them, I thought of
Cain with his (pre-cell-phone) camera, lying beside his boyfriend and catching
him, perhaps unawares, in the midst of a shared day of sunning and swimming.
Did Cain know at the time that he would use the photographs as source material
for a new series of paintings? Or was he simply taking some snapshots, for his own
pleasure, of Sean? Were the photographs a byproduct of a day spent at the beach,
or was the day planned around the production of the pictures? My intuition tells
me it was the former, that it was just a day at the beach, and that, in looking at the
photographs at some later point, Cain recognized the creative and compositional
possibilities they afforded.
The Sean paintings were not the last works Cain completed. After Sean
Number Three he finished several Los Angeles paintings, and he was working on at
least one more at the time of his death. If the Sean series has nevertheless come to
represent the terminus of his work and life, it is in part because Sean Number Two
appeared on the poster for an exhibition that opened at Matthew Marks Gallery
shortly after the artist’s death [fig. 24]. The show had been in the works for almost
a year, and, devastated by the loss of his friend, Marks considered canceling it.
After speaking with Cain’s friends and fellow artists, however, he decided to pro¬
ceed with the exhibition, and the poster went out as planned. The show was called
“Peter Cain: New Paintings and Drawings,” a title that must have acquired a poi¬
gnant, if not unbearably sad, meaning for Cain’s friends and loved ones. After this
exhibition, there would never be any more “new work” to show. These paintings
and drawings, including the Sean series, will always be his last.
Fig. 24
Exhibition poster for “Peter Cain: New
Paintings and Drawings” at Matthew
Marks Gallery, New York, 1997
133
Writing in The Village Voice , Peter Schjeldahl opened his review of the show
in a highly unusual fashion:
“New York artworldlings ploughing through our daily curse of not-in-
variably-100-percent-useless art mail last month unfolded copies of a
modestly sized poster and instantly reacted in ways that caused anyone
who was in the room with us to stare quizzically. My wife heard me laugh
from sheer startlement. Then she saw the poster and was wowed, too.
Many exhibition announcements are intended to do this, and maybe two
or three a decade do it: go off in one’s hands like letter bombs of unique,
original beauty. It was — and is, and will be, as already a classic — the
painter Peter Cain’s announcement for his present, posthumous show.” 3
Schjeldahl slides in and out of different temporalities and tenses (“It was — and is,
and will be,” “his present, posthumous show”) as though the critic were still
adjusting both to the fact of the artist’s death and to the startling effect of the Sean
series in comparison to the works that preceded it. His word choice (“artworld¬
lings,” “startlement,” “letter bombs of unique, original beauty”) seems equally
off-kilter. No less unusual than Schjeldahl’s prose, however, is his decision to focus
on the poster in such detail. A work illustrated in an exhibition announcement,
whether as a postcard, poster, or magazine ad, is meant to pique the recipient’s
interest in seeing (and, ideally, purchasing) the original. Here, however, Schjeldahl
reviews the poster rather than the painting itself. And he gives the poster a rave.
Late in the process of writing this essay, I asked the Matthew Marks Gallery
for a copy of the 1997 poster. I made this request (which was duly fulfilled by the
gallery) under the guise of research. In truth, I could have completed my essay
without it. But I asked for the poster because I wanted to have it on my wall — to
share in the beauty of Sean and in the memory of Peter.
Although we never met, Cain and I grew up in the same town: Livingston,
New Jersey. Though only forty-five minutes from New York City, the middle-class
suburb always seemed to me the very antithesis of Manhattan cosmopolitanism.
Livingston was the province of the mall rather than the museum, the roller rink
rather than Studio 54. As a boy, I never imagined that an artist (or, for that matter,
an art historian) could emerge from such a town.
Rather than searching for the young Peter Cain in Livingston, I returned to that
day on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. I asked the gallery whether there were addi¬
tional photographs, and they e-mailed me two pictures printed after Cain’s death
from negatives found in his studio. In one, we see the sleepy-eyed artist in a pink
T-shirt and blue cut-off shorts [fig. 25]. He looks up at the camera, which must have
been held by Sean standing above him. Peter lies vertically across a white towel set
out horizontally. His legs extend off the towel; patches of sand cling to his upper
thigh and calf. A pair of blue Birkenstocks, presumably his own, sit next to the towel.
Consider, as an extended caption to this picture, the following recollection of
the artist by Jack Pierson:
“Peter was very boy. He smoked Marlboros, didn’t make his bed, only
wore Wranglers or Levis cords with a Fruit of the Loom pocket T-shirt
Fig. 25
Peter Cain in Fort Lauderdale, c.1994. Photo by Sean LeClair
134
Fig. 26
Sean LeClair in Fort Lauderdale, c.1994. Photo by Peter Cain
and a ski hat. He was a spoiled brat because anybody would do anything
for him, and he basically did whatever he wanted, which was not much,
besides paint and listen to music. Did I mention he was gorgeous?
Pretty, like an angel that you just wanted to slap. So of course he got
away with murder.” 4
As Pierson remembers him, Cain was part slacker, part bad boy, and altogether
irresistible. Looking at the snapshot of Peter drowsy (or maybe high?) on the
beach, I know that I too would have let him do whatever he wanted.
The second photograph printed after Cain’s death shows Sean lying on his
towel [fig. 26]. It is a variant of the source photographs for the paintings except for
one startling thing: Sean turns to look directly at the camera, and he smiles. Given
the restricted view of his face afforded by the paintings, I was startled by the
immediacy of his smile, by his lifted hand holding a lit cigarette, by the casual
pleasure of his expression, by the particularity of him.
Would we know that Sean was the artist’s boyfriend were it not mentioned in
almost every description of the paintings (including mine)? 5 Rather than offering
the sense of affectionate contact and pleasurable connection suggested by the
snapshots of Sean and Peter on the beach, the paintings suspend Sean between
intimacy and abstraction, between extreme closeness and partial inaccessibility.
Cain’s paintings of Sean as a scruffy Gulliver on the beach are what he bequeathed
to history. Although the posthumously printed snapshot provides access to Sean’s
smiling face, that smile was not meant for us.
I go to the Matthew Marks Gallery to look at Sean Number Two on display in the
gallery’s recent Cain exhibition. The picture has, rightly, been a given a long wall to
itself. Sunlight pours in from the skylights above. I think of Peter and Sean on the
beach and the distance separating that day in southeast Florida from this one in west
Chelsea, the distance between a private snapshot and a public painting, between the
self you show the world and the self you share only with your boyfriend. I move
closer to the painting, as close as I can get without alarming the gallery staff. I take
in once more Cain’s treatment of the ponytail and birthmarks, of skin and sand and
sky. I back away from the painting and leave the gallery. I have just had an intimate
experience with the picture. It has conjured for me a vivid memory of the artist, a
memory of Sean and Peter, a memory of a day I never had. I call my boyfriend back
in Los Angeles and tell him I miss him.
NOTES
1. Jack Pierson, “Peter Cain,” in Peter Cain: The Los Angeles Pictures (New York: Matthew Marks
Gallery; Cologne: Galerie Aurel Scheibler, 2005), p. 3.
2. Jerry Saltz, “Carpe Diem,” The Village Voice , October 23, 2002, p. 67.
3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Hail and Farewell,” The Village Voice , February 25, 1997.
4. Jack Pierson, op. cit.
5. Sean’s status as Cain’s boyfriend was freely acknowledged by virtually every critic who wrote on the
paintings in 1997 save for, peculiarly enough, Roberta Smith in The New York Times , who referred to
their subject as simply “a man named Sean.” See Roberta Smith, “A New Surge of Growth, Just as
Death Cut it Off,” The New York Times , February 14, 1997, C 33.
135
Untitled (1), 1996. Untitled (3), 1996
Untitled (5), 1996. Untitled (6), 1996
Untitled (9), 1996. Untitled (11), 1996
136
Untitled (14), 1996. Untitled (25), 1996
Untitled (32), 1996. Untitled (40), 1996
Untitled (47), 1996. Untitled (49), 1996
All drawings: Graphite on vellum. 9x12 inches; 23 x 31 cm
Untitled Number Three, 1996
Oil on linen
37 x 57 inches; 94 x 145 cm
138
Untitled Number Four, 1996
Oil on linen
42 x 60 inches; 107 x 152 cm
140
Study for Mobil, 1996
Graphite on Saunders Waterford Series paper
1478 x 22 Va inches; 38 x 57 cm
142
Study for Glendale Boulevard, 1996
Graphite on vellum
8!4 x 12 inches; 21 x 31 cm
Untitled Number Five, 1996
Oil on linen
49!4 x 60 inches; 126 x 152 cm
144
Glendale Boulevard, 1996
Oil on linen
37 x 57 inches; 94 x 145 cm
146
Mobil, 1996
Oil on linen
37 x 57 inches; 94 x 145 cm
148
“Peter Cain” at Simon Watson, New York, 1991.
From left: Single Wheel Miata, 1990. Carrera 911
Turbo #1, 1991 [p. 61]. Below: “Peter Cain:
Paintings & Drawings” at Daniel Weinberg
Gallery, Santa Monica, California, 1990. From
left: Prelude #3, 1990 [p. 57]. Carrera #7, 1990.
Prelude #1 ,1990 [p. 59]
Peter Cain
Born: Orange, NJ, 1959
Died: New York, 1997
Education
1977-1980
Parsons School of Design, New York
1980-1982
School of Visual Arts, New York
One-Person Exhibitions
1989
“Paintings and Drawings,” Pat Hearn Gallery, New York
1990
Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
1991
Simon Watson, New York
1992
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
1995
“Recent Paintings,” Daniel Weinberg Gallery, San Francisco
“Paintings, Drawings, Photographs,” Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
1997
“New Paintings and Drawings,” Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
2002
“More Courage and Less Oil,” Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
2005
“The Sean Pictures,” Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
“The Los Angeles Pictures,” Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Cologne
2016
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Selected Group Exhibitions
1990
“The Clinic,” Simon Watson, New York
“Pop 90,” Postmasters, New York
“The Children’s AIDS Project, A Benefit Exhibition,” Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
“Vertigo,” Galerie Thaddeaus Ropac, Paris
1991
“Something Pithier and More Psychological,” Simon Watson, New York
“Someone or Somebody,” Meyers/Bloom Gallery, Los Angeles
“Paintings and Drawings,” Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
“Vertigo: The Remake,” Galerie Thaddeaus Ropac, Salzburg
151
“Peter Cain: Paintings, Drawings,
Photographs” at Matthew Marks Gallery,
New York, 1995. From left: Omega, 1994
[p. 97]. The Gift, 1993 [p. 103]. Saturday
Disaster, 1993. Saturday Disaster, 1993
[p. 93]. Above: “Peter Cain: Recent
Paintings” at Daniel Weinberg Gallery,
San Francisco, 1995. From left: Toronado,
1994 [p. 87]. Charger, 1992-94 [p. 85].
Thunderbird, 1994 [p. 83]
“Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?,” The Hyde Collection,
Giens Falls, NY
“(Dis)member,” Simon Watson, New York
“We’ve lost E.T. but the boy’s coming back: Peter Cain, Michael Jenkins, Michael Landy,”
Karsten Schubert, London
“Act-Up, The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power: Benefit Exhibition,” Matthew Marks Gallery
and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
1992
“5th Anniversary Show,” Karsten Schubert, London
“Psycho,” Kunsthall, New York
“Nayland Blake, Richmond Burton, Peter Cain, and Gary Hume," Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
1993
“Pittsburgh Collects,” Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
“Slittamenti,” Antichi Granat Alla Giudecca, Venice (45th Venice Biennale)
“Drawing the Line Against AIDS,” Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (45th Venice Biennale)
Biennial Exhibition, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul
“A Series of Anniversary Exhibitions: Part III,” Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
“Art, Money & Myth,” Palm Beach Community College Museum of Art, Lake Worth, FL
“Everyday Life,” Kim Light Gallery, Los Angeles
“The Return of the Cadavre Exquis,” The Drawing Center, New York; traveled to Corcoran
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; Forum for Contemporary
Art, Saint Louis; American Center, Paris
1994
“Desire” (Visionaire/DIFFA Benefit Exhibition), Charles Cowles Gallery, New York
“The Institute of Cultural Anxiety: Works from the Collection,” Institute of Contemporary Arts,
London
1995
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
“Richard Artschwager, Peter Cain, Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, Joseph Cornell, Robert Gober,
George Stoll, Steve Wolf,” Daniel Weinberg Gallery, San Francisco
“Summer Group Exhibition: Richmond Burton, Peter Cain, John Chamberlain, Andreas Gursky,
Roni Horn, Gary Hume, Andy Warhol,” Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
“25 Americans: Painting in the 90s,” Milwaukee Art Museum
1996
“Art at the End of the 20th Century: Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art,”
National Gallery, Alexandras Soutzos Museum, Athens; traveled to Museu d’Art
Contemporani, Barcelona; Kunstmuseum Bonn
“Innovation: American Art of Today from the Misumi Art Collection,” Kawamura Memorial
Museum of Art, Chiba, Japan
“The Changing Image,” Claudia Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea, Milan
“Vehicle,” Paolo Baldacci Gallery, New York
1997
“Landscape: The Pastoral to the Urban,” Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College,
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
“Project Painting,” Basilico Fine Arts, New York
“Technological Drift,” Lawing Gallery, Houston
“American Art 1975-1995 from the Whitney Museum: Multiple Identity,” Castello di Rivoli
Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin
“Heart, Mind, Body, Soul: American Art in the 1990s, selections from the Permanent
Collection,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1998
“Painting Now and Forever: Part I,” Matthew Marks Gallery and Pat Hearn Gallery, New York
“Sea Change,” Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY
“C,” Elizabeth Cherry Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ
153
Portraits of Peter Cain, and works inspired
by him, made by Jack Pierson, Nan Goldin,
Tabboo!, Billy Sullivan, and others in a
memorial display accompanying the
exhibition “Peter Cain: New Paintings and
Drawings” at Matthew Marks Gallery,
New York, 1997. Below, from left: Glendale
Boulevard, 1996 [p. 149]. Mobil, 1996
[p. 149]. Sean Number One, 1996 [p. 115].
Untitled Number Three, 1996 [p. 139].
Sean Number Two, 1996 [p. 121]
2001
“Camera Works: The Photographic Impulse in Modern Art,” Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
“Surrounding Interiors: Views Inside the Car,” Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL; traveled to
Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, MA; Frederick R. Weisman Art
Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
“A Work in Progress: Selections from the New Museum Collection,” New Museum, New York
“Tenth Anniversary Exhibition: 100 Drawings and Photographs,” Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
2002
“Drawings: Alan Saret and Peter Cain,” Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles
2003
“Pop Thru Out,” Arario Gallery, Cheonan, Korea
PKM Gallery, Seoul
“We Love Painting: Contemporary American Art from the Misumi Collection,” Museum of
Contemporary Art, Tokyo
“My people were fair and had cum in their hair (but now they’re content to spray stars from your
boughs)," Team Gallery, New York
“Auto-nom: das Automobil in der zeitgenossischen Kunst,” NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft,
Dusseldorf
“GameOver,” Grimm/Rosenfeld, Munich
2004
“About Painting,” Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga
Springs, NY
2005
“Drive: Automobili nell’arte contemporanea,” Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna
“Contemporary American Art from the Misumi Collection,” Tottori Prefectural Museum, Tottori,
Japan
2006
“Twice Drawn, Part 2,” The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College,
Saratoga Springs, NY
“Pop Art 1960s > 2000s: From Lichtenstein, Warhol to the Current Generation,” Seiji Togo
Memorial Sompo Japan Museum of Art, Sompo, Japan
2009
“Wall Rockets: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha,” FLAG Art Foundation, New York;
traveled to Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
2010
“Pastorale,” 80WSE, New York
2011
“Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection,” Whitney Museum of Art, New York; traveled to
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; and Grand
Rapids Art Museum, Ml
2013
“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” New Museum, New York
“Speak, Memory,” Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York
“Ambach & Rice Presents: 40 Years at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery,” Daniel Weinberg Gallery,
Los Angeles
2014
“A Drawing Show,” Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
2015
“Peter Cain, Robert Gober, Gary Hume, Tony Smith, Anne Truitt,” Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
2016
“Pavlova’s Dawg and Other Works by Gallery Artists,” Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles
155
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I Hope Your Not Posponing Because of Fear, 1996
Ink on paper
16 x 12 inches; 41 x 31 cm
Found on the wall of the artist’s studio after his death
Selected Bibliography
Books and Catalogues
1991
Cameron, Dan. Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (Glens Falls,
NY: The Hyde Collection)
Kertess, Klaus. “Cartography” (New York: Simon Watson) [exhibition brochure]
Leigh, Christian. Vertigo (Pahs: Edition Thaddaeus Ropac)
Saltz, Jerry. We’ve lost E.T. but the boy’s coming back (London: Karsten Schubert)
1993
Cheim, John, Diego Cortez, Carmen Gimenez, and Klaus Kertess. Drawing the Line Against
AIDS (New York: Rizzoli)
Philbin, Ann, Ingrid Schaffner, Charles Simic, Mary Ann Caws, and Elizabeth Finch. The Return
of the Cadavre Exquis (New York: The Drawing Center)
Sussman, Elisabeth, Thelma Golden, John G. Hanhardt, and Lisa Phillips. 1993 Biennial
Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art)
1994
Millar, Jeremy. The Institute of Cultural Anxiety: Works from the Collection (London: Institute of
Contemporary Art)
1995
Kertess, Klaus, John Ashbery, Gerald M. Edelman, John G. Hanhardt, and Lynne Tillman. 1995
Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art)
Sobel, Dean. 25 Americans: Painting in the 90s (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum)
1996
lannacci, Anthony. The Changing Image (Milan: Claudia Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea)
Innovation: American Art of Today from the Misumi Art Collection (Chiba, Japan: Kawamura
Memorial Museum of Art)
1997
Drucker, Johanna. Art at the End of the Twentieth Century: Selections from the Whitney
Museum of American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art)
Ross, David, and Ida Gianelli. American Art 1975-1995 from the Whitney Museum: Multiple
Identity (Milan: Charta)
Schaffner, Ingrid. Project Painting (New York: Basilico Fine Arts)
1998
Kertess, Klaus. Sea Change (Southampton, NY: Parrish Art Museum)
2000
Anderson, Maxwell, et al. 2000 Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art)
2001
Fox, Judith Hoos, et al. Inside Cars (New York: 2wice Arts Foundation)
2002
Nickas, Bob, and Carroll Dunham. Peter Cain: More Courage and Less OH (New York: Matthew
Marks Gallery)
2003
Barthes, Roland, Ulrich Lehmann, and Werner Lippert. Auto-nom: Das Automobil in der
zeitgenossischen Kunst (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz)
Hiromoto, Nobuyuki, and Junichi Shioda. We Love Painting: Contemporary American Art from
Misumi Collection (Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art)
MacAdam, Barbara. Pop Thru Out (Cheonan, Korea: Arario Gallery)
2005
Contemporary Voice: Contemporary American Art from Misumi Collection (Tottori, Japan: Tottori
Prefectural Museum)
157
•n h rnrv
More Courage and Less Oil, 1996
Ink on paper
20 x 16 inches; 51 x 41 cm
Found on the wall of the artist’s studio after his death
Maraniello, Gianfranco. Drive: Automobili nell'arte contemporanea (Bologna: Galleria d’Arte
Moderna)
Myers, Terry R., and Jack Pierson. Peter Cain: The Los Angeles Pictures (New York: Matthew
Marks Gallery; Cologne: Galerie Aurel Scheibler)
2006
Hiromoto, Nobuyuki. Pop Art 1960s > 2000s from Misumi Collection (Sompo, Japan: Yomiuri
Shimbun, Japan Association of Art Museums)
2010
Kertess, Klaus. Pastorale (New York: NYU Steinhardt)
2011
Rutland, Beau, Dana Miller, Adam D. Weinberg, and Donna De Salvo. Legacy: The Emily Fisher
Landau Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art)
2013
Gioni, Massimiliano, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Jenny Moore, and Margot Norton. NYC 1993:
Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (New York: New Museum)
Selected Articles
1990
Raczka, Tony. “Defamiliarizing an American Icon.” Artweek, November 15, pp. 14-15
Saltz, Jerry. “Wild Thing.” Arts Magazine , March, pp. 13-14
1991
Decter, Joshua. “Review: Peter Cain at Simon Watson.” Arts Magazine, September, p. 77
Smith, Roberta. “Review: Peter Cain at Simon Watson.” The New York Times, May 17
Taylor, Simon. “Peter Cain at Simon Watson.” Art in America, November, pp. 150-51
1992
Adams, Cindy. New York Post, December 1, p. 10
Brock, Hovey. “Nayland Blake, Richmond Burton, Peter Cain, Gary Hume.” ArtNews,
November, p. 140
Kertess, Klaus. “Three Artists for the 90s.” Elle Decor, August/September, pp. 20-24
Saltz, Jerry. “The Ten Commandments of Taste.” Art and Auction, November, pp. 104-09
1993
“Auto Exotic.” The New Yorker, January 11, p. 9
Glueck, Grace. “Review: Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery.” The New York Observer,
January 18
Myers, Terry. “Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery.” Flash Art, March/April, p. 84
Smith, Roberta. “Review: Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery.” The New York Times, January 1
Smith, Roberta. “At the Whitney, a Biennial with a Social Conscience.” The New York Times,
March 5
1994
“A Year in the Life: Tropic of Painting.” Art in America, October, pp. 90-91
1995
Auer, James. “Art Museum Exhibit Embraces Pluralism.” Milwaukee Journat/Sentinei,
September
Karmel, Pepe. “Peter Cain.” The New York Times, April 7
Kimmelman, Michael. “A Quirky Whitney Biennial.” The New York Times, March 24
1997
“American Art: 1975-1995.” Art Now, December, pp. 136-37
Bischoff, Dan. “A Tragedy on the Edge of Success.” Sunday Star Ledger, January 26
Dunham, Carroll. “Head over Wheels.” Artforum, April, pp. 19-20
Goodman, Jonathan. “Peter Cain at Matthew Marks.” Art in America, July, p. 91
Mumford, Steve. “Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery.” Review, February 15
159
t+?LOk£ JHf «>P
F4icm(L6.
Explore the Limits of Failure. / Paintings Capatol “P”, 1996
Ink on paper
11 x 8 V 2 inches; 28 x 22 cm
Found on the wall of the artist’s studio after his death
“Obituaries: Peter Cain.” Art in America, March, p. 126
“Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery.” New York Magazine, February 10, p. 131
“Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery.” The New Yorker , February 10, p. 16
Schjeldahl, Peter. “Hail and Farewell.” The Village Voice , February 25
Smith, Roberta. “Peter Cain, 37, Who Painted Images of Oddly Incomplete Cars.” The New
York Times, January 10
Smith, Roberta. “A New Surge of Growth, Just as Death Cut It Off.” The New York Times,
February 14
Smith, Roberta. “Hudson Valley Conversations.” The New York Times, July 18
Smith, Roberta. “Review: ‘Project Painting.’” The New York Times, September 26
Stewart, Angela. “Peter Cain, 37, Rising Young Artist.” Sunday Star Ledger, January 7, p. 21
Yablonsky, Linda. “Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery.” Time Out New York, March 6-13
1998
“Peter Cain.” Bijutsu Techo Magazine, November, p. 60
Kuspit, Donald. “Report from New York, ‘Painting: Now and Forever’ at Matthew Marks Gallery
and Pat Hearn Gallery.” Art New England, October/November, p. 11
Smith, Roberta. “‘Painting Now and Forever’ at Matthew Marks Gallery and Pat Hearn Gallery.”
The New York Times, July 24
1999
Brown, Gerard. “Photo Finish.” Philadelphia Weekly, March 3
Rice, Robin. “Snapshots.” Philadelphia City Paper, March 26
Sozanski, Edward J. “Assessing Photography’s Impact on Painting.” The Philadelphia Inquirer,
March 12
2002
Dunham, Carroll. “Road Food.” Artforum, October, pp. 132-37
Finch, Charlie. “For Sale: The Object Returns.” Artnet.com
Johnson, Ken. “Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery.” The New York Times, November 15
Newhall, Edith. “Paul Feeley/Peter Cain.” New York Magazine, October 28, p. 97
“Peter Cain.” The New Yorker, October 28, p. 25.
Saltz, Jerry. “Carpe Diem.” The Village Voice, October 23, p. 67
Viveros-Faune, Christian. “Peter Cain.” New York Press, November 13, p. 31
2003
Carioli, Aldo. “Artisti... senza freni.” Focus Extra, winter, pp. 112-16
Johnson, Ken. “‘My People Were Fair...’ at Team." The New York Times, October 31
2005
“Chelsea Art Walk.” Harper’s Bazaar (Hong Kong Edition), August, pp. 234-36
Halle, Howard. “‘Peter Cain: The Sean Pictures’ at Matthew Marks Gallery.” Time Out New York,
August 11, p. 61
Lorch, Catrin. “HoherTon: Peter Cain gilt die letzte Einzelshau bei Aurel Scheibler in Koln.”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 10, p. 49
Richter, Peter. “Die Avantgarde hat Allradantrieb.” Monopol 4, pp. 49-52
Spiher, David. “An Intimate Narrative” Gay City News, August 4
2009
Finch, Charlie. “Christ in the Car.” Artnet, June 6
2013
Lott, Jessica. “Alchemy of Inspiration — Sex, Skater Kids, and Gap Plaid: NYC in 1993.” Art21.org,
February 19
Schwabsky, Barry. “Sugar Rush and Stomachache: On ‘NYC 1993.’“ The Nation, April 15
2016
Collins, Ann. “Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery.” Art Writing, October 13
Piepenbrig, Dan. “Staff Picks.” The Paris Review, October 7
Russeth, Andrew. “Peter Cain Now Has an Online Catalogue Raisonne.” ArtNews, November 28
Wade, Francesa. “Peter Cain.” Studio International, September 21
161
Artworks © Estate of Peter Cain
“A Saturday Disaster” © Beau Rutland
“The Body of C” © Collier Schorr
“The Last of Cain” © Richard Meyer
Book © 2017 Matthew Marks Gallery
Editorial Director: Craig Garrett
Photography Coordinator: Sean Logue
Design: Joseph Logan, assisted by Rachel Hudson and Katy Nelson
Production Manager: Sue Medlicott
Printing: Artron Art Group, China
Unless otherwise noted, all works are in private collections
Photography credits
Pages 1,164: Clayton Anderson
Pages 4, 23, 24, 50, 64, 130: Gregory Carideo
Pages 6, 8, 9,10, 12, 13, 31: Bill Jacobson
Pages 21, 106: Frank Camarda
Page 22 (top): © James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York; digital image © Whitney
Museum, New York
Page 22 (bottom): artwork © Konrad Klapheck/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; digital
image courtesy of Broendum & Co (Photographer: Poul Buchard)
Page 27: The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images (Ted Thai)
Page 28: Bruce Fuller
Page 29: Eric Boman; digital image courtesy of Conde Nast
Pages 30, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41,42, 44, 47, 51,53, 55, 57, 60, 65, 69, 71, 73, 75, 79, 81,85,
87, 93, 97, 99, 101,104, 105, 110, 113, 115, 117, 121, 125, 127, 128, 136, 137, 139, 141,142,
143, 156, 158, 160, 134, 135: Ron Amstutz
Page 32: artwork © Andy Warhol/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; digital image courtesy
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
Pages 49, 54, 63, 94, 131, cover: digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art
Page 70: Tim Nighswander
Pages 82, 83, 86: Ben Blackwell
Page 150: Douglas M. Parker
ISBN 978-1-944929-03-9
Page 1
Peter Cain in his 1973 Cadillac Coupe, Saint Augustine, Florida, 1993
Page 4
Study for Miata #8, 1989
Collage
11x13 inches; 28 x 33 cm
Page 164
Peter Cain in a Mazda Miata, 1993
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